The Family Markowitz

by Allegra Goodman

  —

  At six in the morning, Ed wakes to the noise of cars or trucks on the college road. He jumps out of bed, ravenous, and finds Bob in the living room, writing in his notebook. “Good morning!” Bob greets him. “How did you sleep?”

  “Okay,” Ed growls, incapable of cheer at this hour. “What’s that noise? Garbage trucks?”

  “Tour buses,” Bob tells him. “The British Special Olympics team is dorming at the college. I was just up there, looking around. They’ve got maybe six, eight buses from Minneapolis. It’s something to see.”

  “What about breakfast?” Ed asks.

  “I’ll just wash up and we can walk over together,” Bob says.

  While he is waiting, Ed glances at Bob’s open notebook. He sees that Bob has written his entire personal statement out in longhand. “I preach at First Presbyterian in Syracuse. Of course, we Presbyterians have a thing about being first. Just about all our churches are called First Presbyterian.”

  “Ready to go?” Bob asks, as he emerges from the bathroom.

  Red banners festoon the dining hall—“Welcome, Special Olympians, England, Scotland, and Wales”—and the workers dish out scrambled eggs and hash browns, sausages and French toast. “I guess you’ll want the kosher meal,” says Bob.

  “What did you do here in the winter?” Ed asks Bob at the table.

  “Well, I studied, I meditated, I decompressed,” Bob says. “You get burnt out in a job like mine. There’s creative burnout, where you feel like you can’t write another homily. Then there’s the emotional toll—”

  “Hmm.” Ed stares into his cereal bowl.

  “Troubled, troubled people,” Bob says. “Just before I came here I was counseling a man whose life has really fallen apart, split wide open. He’d married late, and he and his wife had built their dream house. It took them five years. Beautiful place in the mountains. Custom furniture, folk art, antique-toy collection—unbelievable stuff. Then they prepared to have a child and lost the baby in the womb at nine months. They came in for counseling, but by that time the marriage was falling apart. The wife pulled away. I think they’ll have a divorce. We had a ceremony for the child, a kind of funeral—and now the house is up for sale. The husband has been coming to me alone now, studying his Bible, trying to understand.”

  “What’s to understand?” Ed asks. “It’s the American way. First the dream house, then the toys, then death, then religion. It’s so goddamn American.”

  Bob laughs and shakes his head. “It’s true,” he says. “Ed, that’s very well put. Still, the pain is real. The questions are real.” Bob’s voice drifts off. Then he douses his French toast with more syrup. “You want to try out the lake?”

  —

  The lake is full of Special Olympians, swimming and splashing, diving off the dock into the cold green water. Bob jumps in and starts swimming efficiently, stretching out his long body. Ed looks around warily. There must be thousands of mosquitoes in the long, wet grass. Just thinking about it makes him itch. Millions of them breeding in the still water under the dock. He eases himself into the water and paddles around, cold currents seizing his legs. Then he turns back and clings to the mossy dock for support, despite the kids dive-bombing overhead. A small child wriggles by, swimming like a minnow underwater. Suddenly a little girl looks up into his face. Treading water, she stares at him. “Hello,” Ed says, “what sport do you play?”

  “Gymnastics,” she says, and continues treading water, staring into his eyes.

  “And what’s your name?” Ed asks.

  “Alison.”

  “Where are you from, Alison?”

  “The green house at Burnham where the road takes the cliffs down by the sea,” she recites for him. Then she pushes off again.

  “Good luck,” Ed calls after her. He feels cold in the lake, and helpless, with all this splashing life around him. All these people, and these scholars with such histories attached to them—these cosmological systems instead of homes, ancestral totems instead of parents, vocations instead of professions, paradigm shifts instead of childhoods. He’d never developed that kind of mythology about himself—or, rather, he would never discuss it in public! He feels all out of kilter. Since he arrived, he hasn’t been able to hear himself think. Clambering onto the dock, he resolves to take his briefcase and get some work done in the college library.

  The library looks like a cathedral. Desks line up against a railing high up on a balcony. It’s like sitting in a choir loft. Ed peers down at the stacks below. How can he get out of this mess? He could try to call the shuttle service and change his ticket with the airline. He could hide out in his sod house for the afternoon session.

  “Dr. Markowitz?” someone whispers behind him. It is a young monk in a brown cassock and rope belt. “Pat Flanagan. Remember me? The shuttle bus.”

  “Oh!” Ed stares at the young man. He had forgotten about him—the new professor. “I thought you were coming out here to teach,” he says.

  “Oh, yes,” Flanagan says. “But also to join the monastery. How do you like it here?”

  “It’s very nice,” Ed says. “It’s fine. I thought you said it was quiet.”

  “I guess it’s not as quiet at this time of year,” Flanagan says. “They rent out the facilities in the summer, and right now, in particular, we’ve got the Special Olympics, and a basketball camp, and the Elderhostel groups—I guess you’ve seen them.”

  “No.”

  “Well, you can’t miss them—they all wear matching T-shirts. But in winter it’s really peaceful. If you like to walk in the snow, it’s the best place in the world.”

  “Yeah, I heard,” Ed says.

  —

  He slips into the dining hall as soon as it opens for lunch. Then, stealthily, after checking to make sure that none of the conference people are around, he takes a tray and loads up with fried chicken, mashed potatoes, peas, and apple pie. He slips into a seat near the wall, where a long table of Elderhostel students camouflage him. Then he devours the chicken and potatoes. He goes back for seconds. He eats like a man rescued from captivity.

  “Now, Margaret,” says the woman next to him. “I told you before—this weekend we’re having a wienie roast.”

  “Oh, yes, oh, yes, I remember now—and I want to bring something,” Margaret replies.

  “But you don’t have to bring anything.”

  “But I really want to.”

  “Well, now, we always have more than enough food at our wienie roasts. I can’t think of anything.”

  “How about potato salad?” Margaret asks.

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “You don’t like potato salad?”

  “No, I love it.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to fib to me, Eileen.”

  “No, no, I love it,” Eileen says. “It’s just that I don’t think we ever have potato salad.”

  “Oh,” Margaret sounds surprised. “We always have potato salad with our wienies. See, I don’t eat my wienie on a bun. I like to cut mine up on the plate, with the potato salad sort of surrounding it.”

  —

  “Eduardo!” Mauricio Brodsky cries out before the afternoon session begins.

  “Well, you’re happy today,” Ed says.

  “I was at the bookstore, and I loaded up! Catholic theology. An outstanding collection. I spent three hundred dollars—for my research, my detective work. Where were you this morning? You missed Mass.”

  “I’m Jewish,” Ed says, looking at Mauricio with his thin Latin mustache and black yarmulke.

  “It’s true, and that’s why it is imperative, vital, that you go and you understand! I always go, whenever I am near a cathedral, to immerse myself in the sounds and the sights. Of course, it means nothing to me, nothing!” he confides, flicking his long fingers. “But one should go. As a Jew, one must go. To—to—”

  “Experience it,” Ed finishes.

  “No, no, so they can experience you. But let me tell you, the true joy, the
joy of my life, is to bring my Catholic clergy to my own Young Israel—to sit with them in the congregation. It is a beautiful thing to sit down with them, to antagonize the rabbi.”

  “Hello, Professor Markowitz, Dr. Brodsky,” says Brother Matthew. Beads of perspiration stand on his massive forehead. “Are you enjoying yourselves? Do you like your rooms?”

  “Brother Matthew, it is all beautiful, excellent,” Mauricio says.

  “Good, good,” says Matthew. “You know, we have a tradition here at St. Peter’s. When you come here as a guest you become part of the family—and that means you can come anytime and stay with us.”

  “Beautiful,” Mauricio says. “Excellent. So, Brother Matthew, when are you going to tell your tale?”

  “What—me?” Matthew laughs. “I’m not in the conference, you know. I’m just a liaison. I just come down to listen to all of you.”

  “Oh, I think you must tell us your tale,” Mauricio says.

  “There is nothing to tell,” Matthew says. “I entered the monastery when I was sixteen, and what with one thing and another, I never left. Of course, I was over at the Vatican for a couple of years. And I lived eleven years in Alaska with the Inuit.”

  “Well, that’s something!” Mauricio says.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Life wasn’t much different in Alaska,” says Brother Matthew. “The rule is the same, wherever you go.”

  “So…” Ed hesitates. “You joined up when you were sixteen.”

  “I started on the path. I guess otherwise I would have become an auto mechanic like my brothers. I do the monastery auto repairs in any case.”

  Ed stares at the monk and thinks that he really does look like an auto mechanic. This makes him want to ask Matthew what he thinks of all this nonsense at the conference—Marcus, the Southern Jew converted to Catholicism, Sister Elaine and her mother house. He wants to ask, confidentially, whether it gives Matthew the willies. But Rich Mather is talking already.

  “Let me introduce a newcomer, Avner Rabinovitch, our Israeli from the University of Haifa,” he says. “His flight was delayed twelve hours in Paris, so he just got in this morning. He’s a newcomer to the conference, but an old-timer here at the institute—a key member of our Third World Scriptural Caucus.”

  Ed perks up. He himself has a certain interest in the Third World, specifically fringe terrorist groups. He looks with hope at Rabinovitch, an actual scholar whose area of expertise connects to Ed’s own field.

  “I don’t know about you,” Mather is telling them. “But I’ve already got a pile of notes.” He looks around the private dining room, where they sit exactly as they had the night before—Ed between Mauricio and Bob Hemmings, opposite them Sister Elaine and Rabbi Lehrer. “Marthe, would you like to—” Mather turns toward the woman sitting on the other side of Mauricio, the Langenscheidt dictionary on the table. She is extremely fair, with the beginning of a bad sunburn.

  “You must pardon me for my English,” Marthe says, looking up at them with pale-blue eyes. “Also, I must tell you that it was my husband originally to come here to this meeting, but he could not at the end and sent me, his wife, to represent him in his place. So, I must speak not only for myself but for him also, my husband, who is a true theologian—I, only his assistant and a graduate student.”

  Mauricio leans over and says to Ed, “Now, this is the wife’s tale, no?”

  “I must also say,” Marthe continues, “I do not take it for granted—I who am a Christian, and a German one—what it is to sit down with you who are Jews. This is a privilege for me, and my husband says, as well, it is a lesson to us who have residing on us the guilt of our history. So I must deeply thank you.

  “I grew up in Dusseldorf in a Protestant family, not religious but secular-cultural—devoted to books, arts, and music. On weekdays my father played on the piano Mozart, Handel, Schumann, and Brahms. On Sundays he played the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. I grew and married. Then, with Peter, my education began. Peter was searching in his religion. Now we married; we searched together. We were looking for answers to our history. How the Church had stood close by in the terrible events of Hitler. Peter wrote a book about the Protestant Church and the Nazis. Together we discovered the guilt of our religious people, and now, Peter believed, the guilt in our religion itself. Even the good scholars who refused to ally with the cooperating Church—these brought into their own theology a cooperation with anti-Semitism. It was the tenets of the religion which contained the sin, Peter decided, and I, who researched, must agree with him in this. The root of the Church we found corrupt, based on violence—namely, the violent seizure of the Hebrew Scripture by a latter culture. Peter asked me, What have the Christian interpreters to do with Jesus’ own view of the Scripture? For Jesus read the text as a Jew. Yet it was seized and made over for new uses. Peter’s book led him to despair the Church, passive in the evil time of this century. We thought together, How to reply to this history? How must we raise our two children? To the question of evil in the world, we know there is no answer. To the question of the Church, we did not know. Then Peter found an idea in himself. He said to me, This church failed us, but with us it may be changed. We must use theology to understand, and we must employ our historical scholarship to reform. In our own Lutheran tradition of Reformation, we may strip away the rotten and make new. This is my husband’s idea in life, and for me, too, although I have returned only recently to university now that my children are growing. The Hebrew is for me difficult, but I study and grow to it so I and Peter may continue. We must continue. However, we have no escape from our terrible guilt—” Marthe’s voice breaks; her eyes fill with tears. Mauricio reaches out and clasps her hands, and Ed sees that Mauricio is also crying. The two of them sit there together, clasping hands. “We must always ask pardon,” Marthe weeps.

  “We must give it,” Mauricio says.

  No one else speaks. Finally, Rich Mather says, “Well, I can feel the energy in the room. Marthe, it was a beautiful statement. Really. Maybe—Mauricio?”

  Mauricio begins to talk, seriously, quickly. Of course, Ed thinks, Mauricio will offer no satirical comment on himself, no title for his own story. Ed looks down at his own open notebook, covered with spiraling doodles. He picks up his pen and writes: “The pardoner’s tale.”

  “My parents raised me and my brother in Buenos Aires,” says Mauricio. “The rest of my family died in the camps. They sent me to Catholic schools because they wanted me to be a lawyer, and there I learned not only the Christian but the Jewish Bible. On holy days I walked in streets scattered with leaflets, scattered like flowers, quotations from the gospels—‘ “Crucify him,” said the Jews, “crucify him!” ’ Here was my second taste of anti-Semitism—here my resolve to fight the bigotry, both in Jews and in Christians. I became a rabbi, and I settled in New York City to work in the Jewish–Catholic Dialogue Foundation. There, I met my great love—Catholic theology and canon law. My academic delight! My apartment is filled with Catholic missals, tracts, Passion plays, but, above all, canon law. I write for all the religious presses. Last year, when my daughter was engaged, we were having a little party for our new in-laws. Very observant Jews, dressed in black, wearing black hats—who knew whether they would eat our food? My wife looked at me. ‘Mauricio,’ she said, ‘your books! They’re all over the apartment. They are in the dining room! What will these people say to us? Shouldn’t we do something? Hang a curtain? Put up a screen?’

  “ ‘Anna,’ I said, ‘This is what I am—how can I hide it? My life is here. Is this so terrible? Is this like a skeleton in the closet?’

  “Naturally, with my own religion, I have nothing but aggravations. It is too close to me to enjoy. Every Shabbat I go to my little synagogue and I am disgusted with the way the service runs. What can I say? I love to complain. Mistakenly, I turn on a light on Shabbat. Do I worry that God is angry with me? Certainly not. So he is angry with me. So what? I am angry with God! He let my family die. For this I will never forgive h
im. Always I have this argument with God. I ask him, why did you fail us? Men may fail. How can you, ever? What is this study of evil? I agree with Marthe—there is no answer. What is this thing, theodicy? My family went to the ovens, and that’s it—” He breaks off, breathless.

  “This is so true,” affirms Avner Rabinovitch. Ed’s hope in the Israeli scholar dies. Rabinovitch is obviously not going to speak like a scholar but like one of them. He speaks hoarsely, with a heavy Israeli accent, a haunted look in his eyes—either from anguish, Ed thinks, or from his sleepless night at de Gaulle. “What could it be? What answer is there from a God like that? I myself argue with God, talk against him in the night. I work at the university, teach my classes. At home, I pace, with the holy book in my hand. What can commentaries mean? How can the commentators explain evil? They talk about words and letters in words. They ask—empty questions.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Rabbi Lehrer puts up a hand. “There are many discussions of evil in the commentaries, and among our great philosophers. I myself have found many answers. There is the work of—”

  “Rabbi,” Mauricio interrupts, “what kind of evil could you see in Canada? We should all be so lucky to live in Canada during the major catastrophes, the world wars.”

  “I think that’s an ad-hominem argument,” Lehrer fumes. “I was making a point about theodicy.”

  “Well, my point is this,” Avner breaks in. “I had a son once. Now he is no more. How can I justify his death in Lebanon? Who can justify a thing like that? Can I find solace in the Scriptures? I read the sacrifice of Isaac and find there the death of my son. His death, over and over, in the letters of my book.”

  “Hold on,” Bob Hemmings says, puzzled. “Isaac didn’t die. He was saved.”

  “Yes!” says Avner, and his fleshy face reddens with emotion, surprisingly young. “That is exactly the point. Isaac was saved. But my son was not rescued by any angel. He is gone, but I must live and teach, and argue why with God. And this is my work, to ask these questions, while my colleagues in religion debate—fine points. And this is what I am saying. The true scholar must consider the texts with his own experience. What can my colleagues gain, counting words? I take up the Scriptures in the dark night of my soul. I demand it—speak!”